THE PROGRESS OF SAVAGE RACES.
WE wish Sir John Lubbock, or some other man with the necessary knowledge and lucidity of expression, would deliver a special lecture on the rate of savage progress. He might be able in the course of it to resolve one or two problems presented by savage life which are, to us at least, grave per- plexities, weakening the hold on us of the general theory of pro- gress. Sir John holds, as we understand his writings and his abominably reported lecture of Saturday at Toynbee Hall, not only that some savages have progressed, which is past question, many peoples now civilised being the descendants of true savages, but that all savages, like the rest of mankind, tend to progress. Now, is that quite true, or being true, is the rate of progress such that man has any right to hope that savages will, during any period about which it is profitable to speculate, become civilised human beings P Sir John Lubbock tells us that modern savages are not like primi- tive savages, modern savages having placed themselves in many cases under the yoke of elaborate and complex customs which are signs in their way of progress. We suppose the deduction is true, for though civilised man shows a tendency to abandon custom, or to hold it lightly, semi-civilised man clings to it as his sheet-anchor, the Chinese, for instance, obeying certain rules with a rigidity equal to that of the modern savage.
If, therefore, the Chinese were ever savages, which on the theory is certain, their devotion to rigid custom is either a sign of progress or a corollary of it. It is not a sign of rapid progress, devotion to custom being merely a rude way of pre- serving the accumulated result of experience or the ideas held to be true ; but still, it is a sign of advance beyond the true child- like stage. The Chinese certainly have progressed, and as cer- tainly are custom-worshippers. But why is Sir John Lubbock so sure of his datum that primitive savages were less under the yoke of custom than modern savages are ? How do we know what savages were like in those early times, when observers could distinguish nothing except the broadest facts, and travellers described a savage tribe much as English sailors would now ? May not an aboriginal race of B.C. 2000 have been governed by a clan system as elaborate as that of Australia, no trace of which has come down to us P It is not likely ; but the wisest know nothing about it, and in building a theory on primitive absence of restraint, we are building in reality on a plausible assumption. Then is it clear that the progress, if there is progress, goes on at a rate
which affords any hope of great advance during the lifetime of man upon the planet P Take Sir John's Australians, for example. He knows better than we do the nearly irresistible evidence which exists—and was published by ourselves some two years ago—for the antiquity of the Australian aborigines. Either the mounds of clam shells on his coast were put there by some tricksy spirit intent on deceiving savants, or the native must have lived where the mounds are, fishing and eating, breeding and dying, for some thousands of years. If that savage has progressed, why has his progress been so purposeless, or his rate of progress differed so much from the rate recorded in European and Asiatic annals P To all appearance, he would not become civilised at that rate in scores of thousands of years, and why should he become civilised at all ? Because there is a law of progress ? Well, grant it as regards certain races, where is the positive evidence of it as regards others ? May not the Veddahs be old ? It is difficult to argue without going behind history ; but does Sir John Lubbock see proof, unquestioned proof we mean, that the black races of Africa have progressed —except, of course, under conquest—throughout the history of man? As it seems to us, there are grounds for the belief that they have not, that the law of progress as regards the Negro is either non-existent or dependent upon this,—that ho shall come in contact with some more pro- gressive and more vigorous of the tribes of men. The Arab, who gives him Mahommedanism, improves him, and so does the Anglo-Saxon, who gives him Christianity ; but left to him- self, the Negro, to the human eye, remains where he was, or, as in Haiti, retrogrades. It is distinct retro- gression, and not mere pause, for a race which had abandoned cannibalism to go back to it ; and Vaudooism is at least as low as fetichism. We do not see in the Negro the operation of any self-generated law of progress, or in the Red Indian. It may be there ; but where is the proof of it so strong that we should build on it a theory of the world P We wish to believe in permanent progress and self-generated progress, for that would make many theological difficulties much less ; but as yet the facts seem to show that two or three families of men, notably the Aryan, Arab, and Mongol, have advanced up to a point—a point in the Aryans' case still susceptible of further progress—and have compelled or persuaded other families to advance with them ; but that these others, if left alone, either do not advance, or advance by grada- tions so like those of glaciers that the historian cannot follow them, and that the observer has little right to be certain that they occur at all. There are black tribes in the Upper Valley of the Nile, described by the surgeon Werne, who certainly
are no advance on the blameless Ethiopians of whom the Greeks knew, or thought they knew. It may be that conditions have been unfavourable ; but then, that answer is an answer also to the general theory of progress, which ought to be possible under any conditions not fatal to human life. Besides, what are the conditions which make Tasmania, with its English climate, so unfavourable to progress, that while the Pict developed into a civilised man, the Tasmanian did not develop at all, but remained always a little higher than the monkey, till God in his mercy ended the effort and his race ?
It seems to us that modern cheeriness has slightly infected scientific men, and that in their eager hope to show that natural science presages a great future for man, they leave out of view some unpleasant facts which militate against their theory. They take time into their account
at one point, and not at another. They will assert that the development of man from a monkey, or a reptile, or what- ever is the latest theory about his ancestor, must have occupied cycles of centuries, and that cycles more passed before. man
could use tools or make fire ; and then they expect, or write as if they expected, another enormous advance within some trumpery period marked in recorded history,—for example, some two or three thousand years. Why ? Where is the evidence that the man of the Niger would not take a million or so of years before he, unassisted, attained to civilisation, especially if he passed through that period of " arrestment" which has certainly str nck some races, and the duration of which is as uncertain as the duration of the world ? Scientific men are conscious of the greatest of the marvels of the universe, the astounding way in which productive or creative energy is wasted, generations of creatures perishing uselessly before the creature to survive is born, and forests decaying that a few trees may live ; but they seem unwilling to expect such waste of men. Why not ? Is it because of the value of sentient beings in the economy of the universe ? If humanity all perished to-morrow through some vast calamity, say, by the emission from all volcanic regions of some poisonous vapour —a thing believed to have occurred on a minute scale— the loss would be far less than the loss of babies which has occurred since the beginning of the world, and would be less, in- deed, than the loss of stillborn children only. If Nature, or Law, or Providence can afford to waste human beings, even Aryan beings, at that prodigious rate, why should it not waste whole races of savages ? It has wasted two within quite a short period, the Caribs of Cuba, and the Tas- manians ; and it is wasting two more quite visibly, the Australians of the mainland and the Maories. Why should it not waste the remainder, leaving the world altogether to men of some higher type, or other type, as has happened with some animals ? We do not see, we confess, though we wish to see, why, on the scientific theory of the universe, we should expect so much progress in savages, or why a Digger Indian, say, should gradually advance until he can count up to the numbers which astronomers are accustomed to use.
Why should he not perish, or, if his vitality is strong, as is the case with some Negro tribes, why should he not survive as a kind of half-developed man ? He has done so for ages in Australia, and why should the ages end ? We can see a hope for him in the Christian theory, which assigns to the Negro, as to Newton, two lives ; but on the scientific one, we see nothing for him, if he remains unconquered and of unmixed blood, except a doubtful probability of advance at a rate which the human mind can scarcely discern, and which, as a factor in history, it is useless even to consider. Judged by Christianity, the savage has a future ; but judged by history and science, the best thing that could happen to him would be to disappear as rapidly as possible, and make room for the useful peoples, who two centuries hence will have scarcely room to breathe.
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